Shuttle Imaging Radar A (SIR-A) Earth Surface Imagery

This data set contains earth images acquired by the Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-A) which flew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in November 1981 (STS-2). The SIR-A instrument operated for a total of almost 8 hours during the 2 and 1/2 day flight. The imagery produced from this instrument is very useful for a variety of topographic and geologic analyses. SIR-A is a horizontally polarized L-band radar operating at 1.28 GHz (23 cm). The SIR-A obtained imagery at a resolution of 40m with a swath width of 50km and a look angle of approx. 45 degrees (variable). The imagery is produced at a scale of 1:500,000. This data set contains several independent data takes which provide coverage over several areas including southern North America, southern Asia and Europe, Australia and the Pacific islands, north Africa and northern South America. A map of the coverage is available from NSSDC as part of the data description packet. The data are available on a variety of media from NSSDC. Related data sets which may be of interest include the Shuttle Imaging Radar-B (SIR-B) which flew onboard the space shuttle in 1984 and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data from the Seasat satellite, and data from SIR-C/X-SAR which flew on the Space Shuttle in April 1994.